Today we are thrilled to announce the general availability of PACER Docket Alerts on CourtListener.com. Once enabled, a docket alert will send you an email whenever there is a new filing in a case in PACER. We started CourtListener in 2010 as a circuit court monitoring tool, and we could not be more excited to continue expanding on those roots with this powerful new tool.

The best way to get started with Docket Alerts is to just make one. Try loading a popular case like U.S. v. Manafort or The District of Columbia v. Trump. Once the case is open, just press the “Get Alerts” button near the top. Then, just wait for your first alert.

We believe PACER Docket Alerts will be a valuable resource to journalists, researchers, lawyers, and the public as they grapple with staying up to date with the latest PACER filings.

Our goal with docket alerts is to make them as simple as possible to use. Once you have found a case you are interested in, a single click is all it takes to turn on an alert for that docket. From then on, we will send you an email …

One of the great new features that the new version of CourtListener provides is what we’re calling Citation Searching. Citation Searching lets you look at all the opinions that cite an opinion you’re interested in and then slice and dice them so that you only see the ones that are important to you.

For example, say you’re looking at Roe v. Wade and you want to analyze the cases that have cited it. In CourtListener, in the sidebar on the left, there’s a list of the opinions citing the one you’re looking at, in the section called “Cited By”. At the bottom of that section, there’s a link that says, “Full List of Cited Opinions”.

If you click that link, you’ll be taken back to the search results page, and you’ll see that your query is for cites:(108713). The number in there is the ID of Roe v. Wade that you can see in its URL. This is just standard CourtListener search syntax, so you can tweak it however you like.

We rolled out a new feature today on CourtListener that allows you to
stay up to date with court opinions and oral arguments as fast as we
know about them. We’re calling it Real Time Alerts, and donors can
start using this now by selecting “Real Time” in the rate drop down when
creating alerts:

Once you’ve set up an alert with this rate, we’ll begin checking the
hundreds of items we download each day and we will send an email as soon
as a new item triggers your alert. Just like our other emails, once you
get the alert, you can click directly on the results to read opinions or
listen to oral arguments.

For journalists and other users with speed-critical work, it’s as simple
as that to keep up with hundreds of courts. Let us know what you think!